Apart from that, you’re free to build outside the lines. If you want a sofa that looks like a boot or a wall-mounted skull sculpture, it’s easily done. As you grow more comfortable with the interface, you’ll be able to make some surprisingly elaborate objects.

The motivation for building objects is simply to please the Sims who move into the town. There are a few already installed at the start, and once you’ve satisfied their whims and created the items they need for their homes and businesses, more show up at the town hotel, hoping for an invite.

Each prospective resident has specific likes and dislikes. You can tailor the population by inviting only certain types of folk or create a social melting pot by letting all sorts move in, which means more work for you. You can’t just build a plain old freezer for the ice cream parlour or a standard desk for the spooky museum boss. The items are only deemed acceptable if they contain specific essences – things you dig up, pull out of the water and shake out of trees.

So if you find one rose blossom, that’s one rose essence in your inventory. If you plant it, water it and wait a few minutes, you’ll have a rose tree that wll produce unlimited blossoms/essences. If you chop it down, you’ll have some dark wood essences as well, and you can plant another rose to bring it straight back to life.

A typical task might be to build a sofa with 10 dark wood essences and six roses, so you’d pop into the workshop, design a sofa and paint its individual blocks with the required essences. If there aren’t enough blocks in the basic template, you’d have to build something more elaborate or add some whole essences – you could stick roses to the sides or have twists of dark wood lined up along the back.